OFF TO ILLUSTRATE THE WIZARD
An Interview with Michael Hague
by Dan Smith
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 1983), pgs. 22–24
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Smith, Dan. “Off to Illustrate the Wizard: An Interview with Michael Hague.” Baum Bugle 27, no. 1 (1983): 22–24.
MLA 9th ed.:
Smith, Dan. “Off to Illustrate the Wizard: An Interview with Michael Hague.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 27, no. 1, 1983, pp. 22–24.
One of the most successful of current children’s book illustrators is the young artist Michael Hague. While most children’s books are lucky to sell between 20 and 30 thousand copies, his first major work, a newly illustrated edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1980), has sold over 200,000. The following Fall, he issued Michael Hague’s Favourite Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales which sold 80,000 copies in its first printing. Last season, his principal publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston in New York published Michael Hague’s interpretation of The Wizard of Oz in a first printing of between 100 and 150,000 copies. This last book, requiring ninety watercolors to fully illustrate L. Frank Baum’s famous story, is perhaps Hague’s most ambitious work to date.
Hague was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1948. It was his kindergarten teacher who first recognized his natural artistic ability. She was startled by the understanding of perspective in one so young, and largely through her early encouragement Hague was determined to become an artist. Although he graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles with honors in 1972, Hague admits his special brand of fantasy is primarily self-taught. While his contemporaries studied Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, Hague learned his craft from Walt Disney, Hal Foster (who created Prince Valiant), and he popular early 20th century British illustrator W. Heath Robinson. Critics have noticed traces of other such important artists as the Russian Ivan Bilibin, the Frenchman Edmund Dulac, and the Englishman Arthur Rackham in Hague’s lush watercolors. Indeed Hague’s paintings share the same feelings of craftsmanship, sensuousness and humor which characterized the work of those major illustrators of the early 20th century.
On graduation, Hague had little choice: become either an abstract painter or an illustrator. He decided on the latter, joining Hallmark Cards in Kansas City; he later worked for the Curren Company in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he still lives in the Black Forest district with his wife Kathleen and their two daughters Meghan and Brittany. Having worked on greeting cards, calendars, and specialty magazines, Hague always wanted to break into children’s book illustration. He credits his first big break in 1976 to Trina Schart Human, the illustrator and then art director of Cricket magazine, to whom he sent samples of his fantasy work. Charmed by his exquisite watercolors, she at once commissioned him to illustrate his first work for children, the fairy tale “The Porcelain Cat” by Michael Patrick Hearn. His new career was launched when he story appeared in the February 1977 issue of Cricket. His beautifully crafted work caught the eye of a children’s book editor in New York, and Hague received his first full-color book to illustrate, Jane Yolen’s collection of original fairy tales, Dream Weaver (1978). He has seldom been inactive as a children’s book illustrator since.
The extraordinary success of The Wind in the Willows and Favourite Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales has provided Hague with the luxury of choosing only those projects which most appeal to him. He had always wanted to illustrate The Wizard of Oz, and he spent nearly a year researching, sketching, and making the final watercolors for this elaborate new edition. His characters went through many changes before the artist was pleased with his conceptions. He did not want his book to be merely an adaption of the famous MGM film as a children’s book. “I, like everyone else, envision Judy Garland as Dorothy,” he freely admits. However, he found a model for Baum’s little girl in his attorney’s daughter. But perhaps the most difficult character he had to interpret was the Tin Woodman. He wanted to avoid both Denslow’s and Neill’s famous Nick Chopper, and Jack Haley as the tin man was just not appropriate. In small details his personality developed: instead of a funnel for a hat, Hague put a colander on the Tin Woodman’s head. “I didn’t think of putting it on until I started drawing,” Hague explains. “It seemed like a natural thing, a colander for a hat.”
Another tradition Hague wanted to avoid was Denslow’s flat colors. Hague admits that that “isn’t my style anyway. In a way, we did try to strike a balance between all of these things—the 1939 MGM film, Denslow, and Neill. It’s sort of a delicate balance between something new and something old.”
Hague does, however, retain the appropriate color scheme from the original book. It did create some problems: “I wanted to pace the book and not have everything look the same in one chapter so you have some variation. But at the same time, you think of the blues of Munchkinland and of the yellows of the Winkies. You don’t want to go against the book.” It is not always easy for an artist to be fully faithful to an author’s words, however. “When authors write,” Hague argues, “I don’t think they think visually sometimes. I’m doing a C. S. Lewis book, a Chronicles of Narnia calendar, and some of his color combinations are really horrible. They sound pretty, but they just don’t look nice. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he’s got this boat that has a purple sail and the boat is green and yellow. It just doesn’t work.” Forunately Baum’s visual sense did not conflict with his new illustrator’s sensibilities.
Hague worked closely on The Wizard of Oz with his editor and designer, Marc Cheshire. “There are some scenes in the book that I told him I wanted to do,” Hague recalls. “He designed the book around them. Some of the scenes were chosen just for their proximity to the text.” Because of the wealth of new pictures, Hague was able to illustrate some incidents in the text which had never been illustrated before. Understandably this required some juggling of the text and art. He and Cheshire tried to vary vignette, full-page, and double-page spread: “You try to balance the whole book out, sort of pace the book, and not get too many things looking the same all in one area.” Some details did have to be altered. For example, Hague originally drew the Yellow Brick Road as jagged pieces, but Cheshire suggested that the highway be laid with traditional bricks, so the artist had to rework some of his original watercolors. Also, Cheshire objected to Hague’s original Kalidahs; the first sketches were then scrapped for a more appropriate interpretation of Baum’s horrid beasts. But such conflicts were few: editor and artist were on a whole in harmony on the production of this new Wizard of Oz.
Hague does not consciously illustrate for children or for grown-ups. Most of his fan mail comes from adults, and many of his admirers have purchased the original art for his children’s books. He is not completely pleased with the juvenile book business. “There’s one thing that annoys me,” he grouses, “when some critic or publisher treats children as though they’re zombies—they all like this or they don’t like that. They’re just like us, with likes and dislikes—only they’re a little smaller.” Reviewers were most favorable to The Wind in the Willows, but there was some reluctance towards Favourite Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales. Hague was particularly irritated by the notice in The New York Times Book Review: Selma G. Lanes carped that Hague’s naked Thumbelina was more appropriate to Playboy than to a children’s book! “It wasn’t pornographic!” Hague retorts. “The reviewer just didn’t like it!” The most frequent criticism of The Wizard of Oz has been Hague’s Dorothy. “I don’t know what they expected,” he replies, “something like Shirley Temple or Judy Garland?” He does, however, admit that he is taking special care with the little boy in his next book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.
Hague admits to having always preferred The Land of Oz to The Wizard of Oz, and he would like to illustrate it someday—but no plans have been set. The Wizard of Oz was always one of his favorite books, and he confesses that his new edition was a labor of love. His final defense for the present book is that “we felt it needed a new rendition. Denslow’s was in 1900, and things are different now. There are good reasons to ado a new edition of Oz.” And no “fellow Oz nut” can argue with that.
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